If you have to travel to meetings for work, it only makes sense that your company would reimburse you for the mileage and/or travel expenses.

What would you do if the mileage reimbursement policy changed so that you basically wouldn’t be able to expense mileage at all anymore?

Would you accept it, or would you brainstorm with your teammates to find a workaround?

In today’s story, one employee who usually works from home shares how the mileage reimbursement changes will change where the employees choose to work.

Let’s read the whole story.

Dock our mileage for driving to meetings from home? We’ll see you at the office.

My department has the option to work from home, which most of us do around 3 days a week.

Most of us live within 10 minutes of the office and commute less than 5 miles.

When we go to in-person meetings with clients straight from our houses, we used to be able to charge the mileage of that trip minus our normal commute.

Fair enough, your employer isn’t going to pay you to commute.

The policy changed.

Since I only live 2 miles away from the office, this wasn’t usually a big deal.

But today, some bigwig in their infinite wisdom decided that they need to dock us 25 miles per trip if we go to any meetings straight from home, because working from home is a privilege and they had to punish us somehow?

That’s more than my commute has ever been, even when I lived in freaking farm country and commuted to this same job the city!

And the trips to my meetings are almost never in excess of 25 miles, even round trip, so basically we won’t be getting reimbursed for our trips, unless the total miles for the day is over 50 miles.

It’s not like the company would even save a lot of money.

Everyone is livid, especially now that gas costs a fortune.

Our mileage checks weren’t even outrageous to begin with- I was making maybe an extra 30 bucks every 2 weeks.

And the funniest part?

We’re allowed to work part of the day from home and part of it from the office.

There’s a workaround, and everyone is in on it.

So from now on, we’re all gonna be stopping at the office for a hot minute before we go to meetings, costing us maybe an extra 10 minutes out of our day, so we can get paid for doing our jobs.

Nevermind the fact that many of the distances to meetings are even shorter when we go straight from our houses, because our client group is assigned geographically based on where we live (to be more efficient and, I don’t know…SAVE ON MILEAGE?)

My entire office, including my boss and even the department head are in on this malicious compliance and it’s gonna be glorious.

Corporate wasn’t happy to save 2 miles off a trip? Okay, well now I get to charge the full distance of my trip as stupidity tax.

I love that even the boss is on board with this workaround to get paid for mileage. Whoever changed the policy really didn’t think it through very well (or at all).

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person shares a story about mileage.

Here’s a suggestion to make going to the office more disruptive.

Bigwigs don’t always think about consequences.

It’s a good idea to document everything.

This is true.

At least there was an easy workaround!

This time, anyway.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.